Catholic members of France's National Assembly who vote for the country's euthanasia and assisted-suicide bill will no longer be able to receive holy Communion, Bishop Marc Aillet of Bayonne, Lescar, and Oloron in southern France has warned ahead of the bill's decisive final vote on July 15.
"A Catholic engaged in public life cannot ignore" the Church's constant teaching against euthanasia, Aillet told France Catholique in a July 7 interview. He highlighted that the Christian faith engages a person's whole existence and that every lawmaker must examine in conscience whether the acts they take align with the faith they profess.
A public vote for a law gravely contrary to the Church's moral teaching, he said, creates "a real problem of ecclesial coherence," and Catholic lawmakers who support the bill need to weigh the consequences of that choice. If they are aware of the inconsistency, he said, "they will no longer be able to receive Communion," adding that the Church has the authority to remind them of this, just as some bishops have already done in the United States.
Aillet said he wanted to invite lawmakers to a sincere examination of conscience and raised the question of whether society has the right to make the deliberate ending of a human life its answer to suffering.
The National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, is scheduled to hold the decisive vote on the bill Wednesday, July 15. Barring a last-minute reversal, the measure is expected to pass by a wide margin, as it has in each of its three previous readings in the lower chamber, most recently by 295 votes to 232 on June 30.
The bill has been rejected three times by the Senate, most recently on July 7 by a narrow vote of 169 to 164, with 11 abstentions.
Under Article 45 of the French Constitution, the government can give the Assembly the final word once the two chambers remain deadlocked after repeated readings, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is expected to invoke that procedure Wednesday.
The bill, titled a "right to aid in dying," legalizes both euthanasia, administered by a doctor or nurse, and assisted suicide, in which the patient self-administers a lethal substance. Access is restricted to adults who are stable residents of France, suffer from a serious and incurable condition in an advanced or terminal phase, experience suffering that cannot be relieved by treatment, and remain able to express their will freely and with full understanding throughout the process.
Aillet also grounded his warning in the Vatican's 2020 letter Samaritanus Bonus, which he said had reaffirmed that euthanasia is intrinsically evil regardless of circumstance. He distinguished true compassion from what St. John Paul II called a "false mercy," arguing that a genuinely fraternal society answers suffering with palliative care and accompaniment rather than the elimination of the person who suffers.
The bishop also called for a fully guaranteed conscience clause for health workers and defended the right of Catholic-run care institutions to refuse to participate, warning that without it, some might be forced to close or relocate abroad.
The French bishops' conference has opposed the bill since its earliest stages, issuing formal statements opposing the bill after the Assembly's first vote in May 2025, again after the second reading in February, and a third time on Ascension Day in May, when it warned of "moral imprudence" and "democratic disrespect" given the absence of political and social consensus.
On the eve of the June 30 vote, the Church released a video appeal to lawmakers, with Archbishop Vincent Jordy of Tours saying the testimony of caregivers, jurists, and associations involved in end-of-life care had been "painfully ignored" during the debates.
The Christian social network Hozana has separately called on believers to join a prayer chain addressed to French lawmakers ahead of Wednesday's vote, an appeal that has drawn more than 58,000 participants.
The bill's critics are not confined to religious circles. The Société française d'accompagnement et de soins palliatifs and other caregiver federations have opposed the text, arguing that palliative care should be made a real, accessible alternative before any shift toward assisted death and that the bill's clinical framework and oversight remain unclear.
Asked about the pending visit of Pope Leo XIV to France, whose chosen motto for the trip is "So that the world may have life," Aillet said he hoped the pope would reaffirm the inalienable dignity of every human life regardless of how the vote turns out.
